Tracking School Children With RFID Tags? It's All About the Benjamins | Threat Level | Wired.com: And it appears that the educational move to Big Brother-style monitoring is motivated mainly by money, despite privacy and health concerns.
Two schools at the Northside Independent School District in San Antonio began issuing the RFID-chip-laden student-body cards when classes began last Monday. Like most state-financed schools, their budgets are tied to average daily attendance. If a student is not in his seat during morning roll call, the district doesn’t receive daily funding for that pupil, because the school has no way of knowing for sure if the student is there.
But with the RFID tracking, students not at their desk but tracked on campus are counted as being in school that day, and the district receives its daily allotment for that student.